bio.display

As the last few experiments didn’t really work out, it’s time to replicate some of the originals, and re-think the ones did recently. Starting from square 1:

• re-grow the bacteria on top of a plate, taken from the cryogenic storage
• create overnight liquid cultures from single colonies of the regrown bacteria
• create agar plates with the liquid culture in them
• perform arabinose experiments with it

Moreover, the UV-light bacteria killing experiment had to be re-done, as most probably the plastic cover of the petri dish itself filters out the harmful UV lights 🙂 So I just did that, and have some plates exposed to UV lights without the petri dish cover, and now waiting in liquid LB to see if they grow out.

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Good news – it seems that the fab@home fabber can indeed create tiny little drops. One has to push the syringe tool about 0.1 – 0.2 units in, and then a little back so that the next drop doesn’t start to form immediately. The drops seem sufficiently small to be used for the installation, so it seems no special pumps are necessary.

The bad news is that the control software doesn’t want to take my simple hand-made STL files to create a lot of these small droplets. But everything in due time…

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It seems that the experiments performed last week by Vincent van Rixel and Joeri Verasdonck didn’t really work out as expected.

Having exposed bacteria inside LB agar to 254nm UV light for 1, 10 and 100 minute durations – they still live. Whereas they should have died instead.

The other experiment revolved around plates with bacteria inside LB agar, left to grow at room temperature, first at room temperature and then put into the fridge 3 days later, or put in the fridge immediately. After 3 days, I dropped 5μl drops of arabinose on them so as to turn on the GFP-producing gene – but nothing happened.

So now I prepared some new plates, and also had one of the plates under 254nm UV light for an overnight time period. Let’s see if they work out…

On Saturday, I demonstrated the fab@home 3D fabber to the participants of the Happy Chaos symposium, using Nutella to print shapes on bread – something inherently sweet 🙂 The idea of using Nutella was actually pioneered by Frank Oxener. Though the material doesn’t allow to draw complex 3D shapes, as it melts away fast, it’s a nice way to raise awareness towards the FabLab itself.

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We had Jennifer Willet’s InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies event at the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden last Friday, which was culmination of her VivoArts class here at The Arts & Genomics Center. Artists doing bio-related stuff disguised as an outdoor picnic – felt really like being inside a ’70-ies Miklós Jancsó movie…

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The following experiments still need to be done:

• killing the bacteria with UV light (a 2 day experiment)
• test for different timings for the arabinose drops to have an effect (a 4 day experiment)

These experiments are going to be done mostly by Joeri Verasdonck and Vincent Van Rixel, students at the Leiden University.

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By now we’ve sort of succeeded in bringing the fab@home 3D fabber into operational state, thanks to the great help of the Waag FabLab people, especially Jean-Michel Molenaar and Bastiaan Ekeler. The kit we worked with is one that we ordered from KoBa Industries. While the kit is designed wonderfully, we still bumped into a number of challanges.

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If all goes well, we’ll show our fabber at the Happy Chaos event this Saturday at the Pakhuis de Zwijger. Because of legal reasons, unfortunately we can’t bring the bacteria along, so we’ll be just showing the fabber as it is, creating nice 3D form out of Nutella, unto toast that has some imagery burned into it by a lasser cutter at the Waag FabLab.

Bon apetit!

Today we’ve done some more fiddling with the fabber, after exchaning some e-mails with Frank Oxener from the Texel FabLab. First the tip of the syringe hat to be clean of dried-up Nutella. Frank’s suggestion was to use a lower pressure for pushing out the Nutella, so that the plug will not push through it. Using a video link to FabLab Norway, we also found out that they were using chocolate to do some fabbing themselves. I also thought – if one can create a syringe that one can keep at constant temperature, one could really use well tempered chocolate for fabbing.

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We got the fab@home fabber working today. We’ve replaced all the limit switches which had their connectors soldered incorrectly. Of course one can’t find such connectors here in the Netherlands that were sent over from the US, so I had to buy new limit switches, which are of course different in their shape, and don’t immediately fit into the old one’s positions. But this is when a laser cutter comes in handy, so that Bastiaan Ekeler drew up an adapter and then cut it out right away – and off we go.

It’s nice and productive to be at the Waag FabLab 🙂

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